Rest In Peace
I just heard the news that Alan Rickman has died of cancer. Four days after David Bowie passed away from the same cause. It sucked to hear that Bowie was gone, but when I went to lunch with a good friend on Monday, I foolishly remarked that as sad as it was to lose an icon, I couldn’t think of any celebrities whose death would really crush me. Then Alan Rickman. It was like the universe was sucker-punching me to prove I was wrong. I am deeply sad that Rickman’s light has moved from the earth to the heavens.
So why does it bother us so much when beloved celebrities die? It’s not like they were close personal friends. The likelihood of any of us meeting and hanging out with a star is infinitesimal. And yet, when they leave us, it’s like out next door neighbor—the one who got invited to the Christmas party and shared barbeque in the summer and was always there when the baby needed to go to the hospital but someone needed to stay and watch the kids—has died. Why is that?
I once had a voice teacher who summed it up nicely. When someone becomes famous, they gain a sort of magic. That magic is highly attractive to us. We crave it, and we consume it, and it becomes part of us. We need that magic to expand our world and to make it shine. It’s not the celebrity themselves who we come to adore and hold close and think of as part of ourselves, it’s their magic. And it hurts when we feel as though that magic is ripped from us.
Both David Bowie and Alan Rickman played pivotal roles in my development as a human being. Yep, I, like so many other tweens watching Labyrinth in the 80s, can pinpoint the moment of my sexual awakening by David Bowie’s pants in his role as Jareth, the Goblin King. We giggle about that bulge, but no, seriously, it was a defining moment in my young adolescent life. That’s the kind of power that celebrities have. They are perfect projections for those crucial moments of human development that we all go through. It’s part of their magic, the thing they unknowingly sign on for when they reach for the stars.
Similar to David Bowie, the moment Alan Rickman walked on screen in Sense and Sensibility, listening to Marianne playing the pianoforte and singing, stepping into a beam of light and falling in love…in that moment, I knew what true romance was. And I knew that I loved older men. Not only that, Rickman was a major bonding point between me and one of my best friends from high school. Our shared love of his magic drew us together and cemented us as buddies in one of the most difficult times of my entire life. Without the slightest clue who I was, Rickman was there for me when I needed him. He continued to be there through good times and bad.
The loss that we mourn when celebrities who have touched our lives pass on is not so much about the death of a person, it’s the loss and fear of the beautiful and important moments of our lives that they have touched leaving us. It’s the loss of an innocent crush and the fear that we will never recapture the fleeting moments of our own life. I hate to say it, but I experienced the same piercing, bitter sense of fear and loss when the Bill Cosby scandal broke, because he too played an incredibly important role in my early life. His magic was ripped away, but the man himself lives on. For all intents and purposes, he died too, or at least the part of him that mattered to me.
The good news as we mourn is that magic never dies. All of the good and noble and sexy and wonderful things that these stars inspired in us lives on in their legacy and their body of work. And new stars are being born all the time. We will always feel the hole that people like Bowie and Rickman have left in us because we can never go back and reclaim those crucial moments of our own human development that they became the face of. Childhood is gone. But life goes on, love endures, and the world is just waiting for us to add to the brightness of magic.
(screencaps of Sense and Sensibility and Labyrinth used under Fair Use to represent the films being discussed)
